The FINSA industrial park in the northwest section of Matamoros looks
more like a suburban high school campus than the base of operations for
some two dozen factories. The tree-lined streets - with names like "Calle
Michigan" and "Calle Ohio" - are clean and quiet, as 7,500
employees put in a day's work. The only visible movement is the water
in the sewage canal that winds through the industrial park, collecting
treated wastewater from the maquiladoras before disappearing into the
surrounding neighborhoods.

It's
hard to believe that ten years ago this area was described by Time magazine
as a "Love Canal in the making."

Back
then, tests of the canal water revealed it to be a toxin-laced cocktail,
with, for example, concentrations of the solvent xylene - which can cause
brain damage - at 6,300 times U.S. drinking water standards.

In
the early 1990's, a rash of anencephaly cases (babies born with partially-formed
brains or skulls) in Brownsville, Texas - across the border from Matamoros
- attracted national attention to the region's environmental contamination.
In the 1992 presidential debates, Ross Perot argued against NAFTA using
a US News and World Report photograph of the polluted FINSA wastewater
canal running through a neighborhood. Lawsuits were filed against corporations
operating here - including General Motors, AT&T, and Fisher Price
- but no conclusive link between the maquilas and the birth defects was
made. Now, say industry executives, after settling the anencephaly case
out of court and installing new safeguards on the ground, all that is
in the past.

"I'm
not saying that [dumping] didn't happen, but if you ask me to give you
some [examples], I couldn't even tell you one in the last 10 years,"
says Bill Wolfe, president of NovaLink, a business shelter that contracts
out its FINSA-based facilities to companies setting up shop in Mexico.
On a recent tour, Mr. Wolfe proudly points out his factory's water- and
waste-recycling equipment. Though he has little interaction with Mexican
regulators, he is confident that the maquila industry's self-policing
keeps things clean. "The fly-by-nighters - you'll never completely
cure that, but we make sure that that's small and doesn't get a foothold
here," he says.

But
community activists, environmental monitors and some officials in both
the U.S. and Mexico are convinced toxic contamination remains a serious
problem here. Lax environmental enforcement combined with the sheer volume
of maquiladoras - their numbers in Matamoros have tripled to 119 since
1986 - have kept concerns about the region's toxic legacy alive. Among
these concerns:

-
Short-staffed and under-funded Mexican enforcement agencies cannot effectively
police maquilas for environmental compliance; one local official says
that factory-commissioned tests are doctored;
- Information on the fate of hazardous maquila waste remains spotty at
best; thousands of tons of hazardous waste simply go "missing"
annually;
- Workers in Matamoros and neighboring cities complain of frequent exposure
to toxics on the job;
- A lack of independent oversight and reliable data on factory emissions,
hazardous waste management, and worker health and safety conditions leaves
citizens with few avenues for redress.

Mr.
Wolfe points out the window of his office to a white one-story plant identical
to the one he is sitting in and recalls surveying the land from a helicopter.
It was 1980, and he was looking for a place to build a new General Motors
plant. "There was nothing but goats and grass here," he remembers.
The site that would eventually become FINSA had no building, plumbing
or electricity lines. Just railroad tracks leading in and out of the border
town.

* * *

Domingo
Gonzalez stops his shabby brown Buick at the unprotected railroad crossing
that divides FINSA from the city's shantytowns, where many of Matamoros's
estimated 700,000 residents live. With a shudder, the last two cars separate
and drift east towards town as the train lurches west. No railroad worker
is in sight. One of the 25,000 gallon tankers is marked as containing
Hydrogen Fluoride, an acid used in semiconductor manufacturing that violently
attacks living tissue, burning to the bone at high concentrations. Mr.
Gonzalez points to the car, "That's from the the QimicaFlor plant
an accident with that car, and you have another Bhopal."

Mr.
Gonzalez, 51, is an environmental health advocate from Brownsville. He
has done community-level organizing to fight water and air pollution in
Matamoros for over a decade. Though still limping from a car accident
that broke his leg in two places six months ago, he seems tireless during
a tour of the city.

"Has
the situation improved? The short answer is, 'It has not.'" says
Mr. Gonzalez. He notes evidence of changes in the maquila operations in
Matamoros: "The stuff that a camera can take a picture of - that
has stopped, or is very discrete. They got smarter," he says of the
factory operators.

Mr.
Gonzalez pulls off the road and into Colonia Chorizo, a long-standing
squatter neighborhood. The plywood houses have tin roofs and small, sickly
trees in the yards. The colonia is named for its shape, stretched out
like a sausage along the industrial park rail line in a part of Matamoros
known as "Chemical Row." Twenty yards beyond the tracks is a
fence, behind which looms the Stepan Chemical plant. A long line of parked
grain cars full of corn fumigated hours ago with the pesticide Methyl
Bromide separates the colonia from the Stepan drainage ditch. According
to Mr. Gonzalez, the plant regularly drained the waste from its pesticide
and household cleaner operations into Colonia Chorizo. Xylene was once
found in the soil here at 53,000 times acceptable levels.

For
a dollar, a young man named Jose digs a soil sample from the black earth
of a ditch running from the plant. The dirt reeks of paint thinner. Jose
shakes his head and takes a sniff of glue from a soda can he keeps in
the pocket of his glossy yellow jacket, a castoff from a Milwaukee bowling
team. "Every time the company would run off their water or it rained,"
Jose says, "the people up and down the neighborhood would all get
sick." He mimics a violent cough, shaking his shoulders and doubling
over. Completing his performance, he looks up and shrugs. "But every
year they would throw a great party and hand out shampoo and soap and
food," he says.

This
toxic inheritance is the byproduct of a wave of frantic industrial development
in Matamoros that began in 1965 with the Border Industrialization Program
(BIP). A local business group's internet site boasts that Mexico's first
maquila took root in Matamoros.

Brownsville
and Matamoros, which had stagnated economically for nearly a century,
embraced the possibility of growth. During the American Civil war, Matamoros
was a booming confederate port, matching New Orleans as a center of commerce
and culture. After the war, the region declined, and never regained its
importance.

Maquila-induced
prosperity came slowly - in 1985, 20 years after the BIP, Brownsville
had a poverty rate of 50%. Across the border in Matamoros, a chronic shortage
of housing drove migrants from interior states to squat in shantytowns
on the city's fringes.

The
region's institutions and infrastructure were not ready for the rapid
influx of factories as the maquiladora program became the centerpiece
of Mexico's export economy strategy. Dr. Antonio Zavaleta, a medical anthropologist
at the University of Texas at Brownsville, notes that corporations "put
industrialization on top of an old system of politics so the enforcement
aspect and the planning aspects of the industrialization were for the
most part not present. And so there were some notable abuses cases
where there was indiscriminate dumping of industrial waste."

Legal and media attention to maquila pollution came to a head with the
1993 anencephaly lawsuit. The case was settled out of court in 1995 for
$17 million - the defendant corporations denied any wrongdoing - but unease
lingered in Brownsville: "The way it was settled made people think
that they [the maquilas] had something to hide," said Jackie Lockett,
former Brownsville City Council member.

The
public spotlight prompted some changes in Matamoros. Several of the largest
polluting industries left town entirely. The FINSA park was the recipient
of a wastewater treatment project from a NAFTA-related development fund.
A sample taken in mid-November from the FINSA wastewater canal and analyzed
at MicroBac laboratories in Brownsville showed only barely detectable
levels of industrial solvents, well within US and Mexican wastewater discharge
standards.

Rick
Luna, community coordinator for the Brownsville Economic Development Council,
is optimistic that the maquilas have permanently cleaned up their act.
"Maquilas have pretty darn good standards. It's a very different
reality from what I think has been the impression. I hadn't heard about
that whole anencephaly thing in about two years - and that was the last
time a reporter came to visit. I think that's beyond the memory."

Mr.
Luna, 30, is one of a wave of educated newcomers drawn by Brownsville's
booming economy. A native of San Antonio, he studied economics at Columbia
University in New York and then returned to South Texas five years ago,
finding good jobs plentiful. He continued, "We finally got a shopping
mall new hotels are going up and we've got our first apartment
complex development in twenty years." On the roof of Luna's office
building there is a billboard selling its space to potential advertisers.
In bright red, it reads "Bigger is Better."

*
* *

Boom
optimism may have replaced the environmental worries of the early nineties
in Brownsville, but environmental regulators in Matamoros insist that
pollution remains a problem. Francisco Guerra, the Matamoros representative
of PROFEPA, a division of the Mexican environmental protection agency,
works in a small office next to the city's sprawling customs complex.

While
an unending stream of cargo trucks enter and exit the country outside
his window, Guerra's three phones never stop ringing. Guerra has a staff
of three, none of whom have computers. "We don't have a lab,"
he shrugs. "The maquilas commission their own tests. Certainly the
results are doctored. Why wouldn't they be?"

Bill
Wolfe denies that maquilas falsify their test results. "That's just
a biased opinion from somebody who's trying to make a point - that's just
ignorance more than anything else," he says of Mr. Guerra's allegation.
"We have the finest treatment machinery here."

Though
Mr. Guerra is quick with ideas on how to improve his department's enforcement
of environmental regulations, he concedes that his suggestions are little
more than a wish-list because of the lack of enabling funds. The $250
charge per sample for independent laboratory analysis of maquila effluent
is far beyond Mr. Guerra's budget.

Another
key problem along the border is a lack of information. Cyrus Reed, a hazardous
waste expert from the Texas Center for Policy Studies in Austin, noted
in an October 2000 report that "Despite the increase in production
in facilites believed to produce large amounts of hazardous waste in Mexico,
public data on the amount of hazardous waste generated is extremely poor."
Because Mexico has a shortage of hazardous waste disposal capacity (there
are three certified hazardous material landfills in the entire country,
and only one in the border region), the uncertainty regarding the production
and location of waste materials is particularly troubling.

The
picture of transborder shipments of hazardous materials is even hazier.
Under Mexican law, maquilas are required to return waste products which
are generated from imported raw materials to the country of origin - usually
the US. Determining the amount of this waste that is actually returned
is extremely difficult. According to EPA Hazardous Waste Border Coordinator
Chris Reiner, "the Mexican and US systems for tracking waste are
not compatible now And now that you have changing administrations
in both countries, all bets [on solving the information problem] are off."

Haztraks,
the database created by the EPA to help track waste materials being transported
from Mexico to the US, has now been offline for over two years. In 1997,
the last year for which data are available, Haztraks shows waste exports
to the US from only 21 companies in Matamoros. Mr. Reiner explains that
this small number doesn't necessarily mean that waste from most of the
city's 119 maquilas isn't being picked up by Haztraks: "some of those
maquilas don't produce hazardous waste, and the waste for some companies
is handled by waste exporting compaies that don't tell [the EPA] which
factories they get their waste from." Still, he concedes, "waste
flows are very hard to get a handle on."

Weak
freedom-of-information law in Mexico makes filling in the missing pieces
of the hazardous waste puzzle even more difficult. Enrique Medina, a San
Diego-based expert on Mexican environmental policy, notes that "the
law gives the public access to federal agency information. But the agency
has the right to deny you access to that information if you're not an
'affected party. And 'affected party'," Medina continues, "can
be very narrowly defined."

*
* *

Martha
Ojeda lights another cigarette as she paces in front of the Church of
the Sacred Heart. She carries a holstered cell-phone on her belt and answers
her frequent calls with a quick "bueno" or "yeah."
She glances toward the church. "I wish they would hurry up,"
she says, "the workers are waiting."

Ms.
Ojeda, who spent twenty years employed in maquilas and is now the executive
director of the San Antonio-based group Coalition For Justice in the Maquiladoras,
is serving as a guide to a small group of Americans that have traveled
to Valle Hermosa - thirty miles southwest of Matamoros. They've come to
the small city to glimpse what life is like for a few of the nearly one
million maquila workers on the border. While Ms. Ojeda drags on her dwindling
Marlboro, the group takes photographs of a baptism.

Ms. Ojeda has arranged for them to meet workers from a local Nike-owned
maquila. "It's important to bring groups like these [down to Mexico],"
she says, "So people on both sides of the border can begin to see
how the others live. It's important that information not stop at the border."
If she had her way, Ojeda says, she would march the Americans through
every maquila on the border and show them first-hand the conditions in
the factories.

Though
Ms. Ojeda and other labor activists have worked for years to document
unsafe conditions inside the maquilas, reliable information about industry
practices remains as hard to come by as data on hazardous waste. For now,
Ojeda continues to collect worker testimonials and to promote transborder
exchanges. But she acknowledges that this approach has its limits. "It's
the workers' word against [maquila management]" she says.

On
the outside walls of one of the Delphi (a former GM subsidiary) plants
back in Matamoros, banners proclaim "10,000,000 hours without a lost-time
injury" - a remarkable record.

Garrett
Brown, coordinator of the Maquiladora Health and Safety Support Network,
is suspicious of such claims. Reliable data on worker injury rates is
simply not available, according to Mr. Brown: "Ostensibly the Mexican
government is supposed to do that, but it's notoriously bad . What
happens is there's tremendous pressure on the workers not to report injuries
so in order not to have any lost-time injuries, [the injuries]
are not reported, or they're finagled." A Delphi spokesperson declined
to comment on Mr. Brown's statements.

Records
like Delphi's, according to NovaLink's Bill Wolfe, are indicative of an
industry that cares for its employees and gets good work and loyalty in
return. "If you treat these kids right," Mr. Wolfe says of his
workers, "and give them a good place to go to work, they'll break
their back for you. They're looking to progress. This is their career.
It's a sewing job to guys like you and I but this is their career."

When
asked if any of the hundreds of workers on his sewing machine lines have
suffered from a repetitive stress injury or carpal tunnel syndrome, Mr.
Wolfe quickly answers, "No." And when asked if exposure to solvents
and glues on the job was a problem in the Matamoros maquiladora industry
he responds that, outside of a few renegenade plants, the industry maintains
good health and safety conditions. "'Exposure to solvents,' now,
that's not anything special in itself. Exposure to solvents in an approved
process isn't a problem - we use solvents in our plant. Now, if you're
sticking your head in it, that's another thing."

But
Manuel Mondragon, a former maquila worker turned organizer for the Matamoros-based
group, Pastrol Juvenil Obrera (PJO-Young Christian Workers), says that
maquilas are anything but safe for workers. "There is not much that
is not incriminating outside the maquiladoras," he says, "But
on the other hand if you are talking about health, the place in Matamoros
where the greatest damage is being done is not outside of the plants,
but inside."

A
1998 study by PJO and a local university, la Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana,
paints a grim picture of the maquila workplace in Matamoros. According
to their findings, eighty-three percent of workers say they receive inadequate
safety gear. Sixty percent claim to work in contaminated environments,
polluted with excessive noise, chemical emissions or dust. And over four
percent have borne a child with a birth defect.

Such
information is impossible to verify without independent oversight - there
is no reliable birth defects registry in Matamoros. In addition, according
to Dr. Zavaleta of UT Brownsville, who conducted several public health
studies in Brownsville and Matamoros beginning in the late 1970s, "there's
a huge underreporting - underreporting of health issues in our area."

So,
border activists continue to build a record. After enough information
is gathered, says Mondragon, the next step will be to bring their case
to the international arena. "These issues are wrapped up in far-reaching
policies," he says. "These are not just local issues. These
are national and international questions."

Mondragon,
Ojeda and their respective organizations have begun to take that next
step by testing the National Administrative Office (NAO), a trinational
body created under NAFTA to address labor grievances. PJO, Coalition For
Justice in the Maquiladoras, AFL-CIO and over twenty other labor and human
rights organizations have presented one of the first complaints to the
NAO. It is the first submission to deal solely with matters of health
and safety.

The
complaint charges that the Mexican government has failed to maintain health
and safety standards in two auto parts plants, Auto Trim and Custom Trim,
both subsidiaries of Florida-based Breed Technologies. Auto Trim's Matamoros
factory produces steering wheels, while the Custom Trim plant in Valle
Hermosa makes gear shift knobs.

The
submission alleges that the two plants regularly and wantonly exposed
their workers to solvents, glues and other toxins on the job without providing
adequate protective gear or occupational training. Further, unreasonably
high production demands and poor ergonomic planning contributed to frequent
accidents.

Pedro
Lopez, a soft-spoken 20-year-old from Valle Hermoso was employed at Custom
Trim until he was fired, he says, because of his involvement in a strike.
Mr. Lopez says he does not miss the long dulling hours at the plant. "The
yellow glue was so strong. After two hours of working with it you would
get headaches, your hands would get stained. We didn't have gloves, we
didn't have face masks. The only protection we received was a pair of
glasses."

When
Mr. Lopez and other employees began to notice that many of their coworkers
were suffering from persistent headaches, skin irritations, and nose bleeds,
they did not have to look far to find the cause of their ailments: "The
fumes come from the glue, it would hurt after breathing it in for a while.
Your eyes would get irritated even with the protective glasses."
Auto Trim and Breed Technologies declined comment for this story.

Mondragon
says the workers have little hope that results will come from their complaint
in the short-term; of the 23 NAO submissions to date, none have resulted
in sanctions. "The [NAO] has been weak. But we have to be mindful
of the big picture," he says as he lights a cigarette.

*
* *

From
the roof of a small grocery store in south Matamoros, where the rough
paved roads give way to even rougher dirt, FINSA hulks on the northwest
horizon. The grocery store crossroads, where the converted school buses
that carry workers home from the maquilas turn and head back towards downtown,
is, according to the most recent map of the city, at the very edge of
Matamoros.

But
Matamoros does not stop; it sprawls past public boundaries and civic maps.
Here is where many of the new arrivals to Matamoros - drawn by promise
of a job in the factories - come to live. They piece together whatever
building materials they can find - scraps of wood, sheets of metal. These
neighborhoods do not have water, electricity, or sanitation service. Garbage
is either burnt or thrown into the canal that cuts through their center.

Across
from the grocery store and over a rickety, wooden bridge, a large crowd
is gathered. In matching green polo shirts, members of the Matamoros Rotary
Club stand around a pick-up truck, handing out bundles of canned goods
and other food to residents of the colonia, 28 De Mayo.

Manuel
Rovlo, a member of the Club, watches the people take their bundles, offer
their thanks and head back to their small homes. He says that because
he is not a doctor or a scientist, his opinions on the health effects
of maquilas would matter little. He has heard rumors that some maquilas,
trying to extend their profits, dump their waste under the cover of night,
but he knows nothing about that, he says. What Mr. Rovlo is sure of is
that these people, many of whom he has just handed the only food they
will see for the week, are not seeing any benefits from either the maquilas
or NAFTA. "It's the same all over the border. In other cities. They
are growing too fast, some faster than Matamoros" he says. "Maquiladoras
pay some taxes, but very little to the city. Not enough. [Maquiladoras]
are like ghosts, haunting the border. To think, this is progress."